Arcadia Awakens

by Kai Meyer

  “You’re not frightened,” commented Fundling after they had been driving in silence for a long time.

  “Should I be?”

  “Everyone here is frightened of something. Most don’t show it, but you can sense it. You could see it in their eyes at the baron’s funeral.”

  “You were there, too?”

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “I wasn’t at the family vault. I’m only the driver.”

  “What are they afraid of?”

  “The Hungry Man.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You’ll soon find out.”

  She shrugged and didn’t reply.

  He waited a moment, then glanced sideways at her. “You’re not curious.”

  “No.”

  They drove on again without another word. Only after a while did Rosa ask, “Are you always like this? Acting like you’re not interested in other people, then suddenly trying to feel them out by simply making a statement? You’re not frightened. You’re not curious.”

  She could see that she had taken him by surprise. He looked almost angry.

  “We don’t either of us like to talk about ourselves,” he said matter-of-factly. “You don’t like to either.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “If it’s true. That you’re not frightened.”

  She thought of her lost stapler. And what had happened back before that. “Not at the moment,” she finally replied.

  “I am,” he said. “I’m often frightened.”

  “Of this… Hungry Man?”

  He shook his head. “Have you ever wondered who’s in the gaps in the crowd?”

  She glanced at him in surprise. Maybe she’d been wrong, and he was more than just a little odd.

  “Gaps in the crowd?” she repeated.

  “If there are a lot of people all in one place, a hundred or a thousand or more, there’ll still be some empty spaces. Gaps right at the front. Or in the middle. Or on the outside. You just have to look carefully to see them.” He shifted gears as two heavy trucks appeared side by side ahead of them. “Those are the gaps in the crowd. And if you look very closely, you notice that they’re moving about. Just like the people around them.”

  Rosa pressed her lips together and said, “Hmm,” as if she understood what he was talking about.

  “They’re weird,” he said.

  “The gaps?”

  “Because they’re not really empty.”

  “No?”

  “No, they aren’t. They’re always there, and in other places, too. Around us, but invisible. It’s only in a crowd you can see them. No one can move into the places where the gaps are.” On the backseat, Sarcasmo sneezed. “No dog either.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you? What is this—some kind of initiation ceremony? Let’s see how stupid the little blonde is.”

  He made a sudden movement as if she had nudged him hard in the ribs. Her old belligerence was back, replacing the contentment that had made her way too friendly and forthcoming.

  She waited for an answer. Waited a long time.

  “Sorry,” he said at last.

  Then he didn’t say another word for the rest of the drive.

  ISOLA LUNA

  THE YACHT PLOWED THROUGH the sparkling, inky blue water. The Tyrrhenian Sea, the part of the Mediterranean off the north coast of Sicily, was a gently rippling expanse under a cloudless early autumn sky. The vapor trail left by a solitary aircraft up there was dispersing like a reflection of the Gaia’s wake in the air.

  The Carnevares’ 130-foot yacht was sailing northeast with a ten-man crew. Besides the captain and his men, there was a barkeep, a cook, and a steward. Isola Luna lay thirty miles off the coast; they would be there around midday.

  However, there was still no land in sight ahead. Apart from a tiny sail on the horizon, it was as if the Gaia had the sea all to itself. It had three decks above the surface and a fourth below. The hollow sound of Europop on the sundeck, with its bubbling Jacuzzi and glazed viewing lounge, floated down to the upper deck, where Tano Carnevare and the five young men and women who had come onboard with him were lounging around, while the barkeep and the steward were kept busy.

  Alessandro and Rosa were one deck lower, sitting on the terrace at the stern of the yacht in front of the open frosted doors of the saloon, which contained a billiard table and a gold-framed flat-screen TV. They had made themselves comfortable in two deck chairs, looking out at the sea and the Sicilian coast far behind them. The sun shone down from starboard, and a warm sea breeze played in Rosa’s long hair.

  Alessandro wore a white T-shirt, pale summer pants, and sports shoes. Although his hair was so much shorter than Rosa’s, he seemed to have just as much trouble keeping its unruly, curly strands out of his eyes.

  “You were right.” She breathed in deeply as she looked at him over the little paper parasol in her cocktail. “And I don’t like having to say that.”

  His straw slipped from his lips. “Right about what?”

  “This really is the most fabulously showy yacht I’ve ever set eyes on. We see plenty of them around in Brooklyn, of course. Now and then. On TV.”

  He smiled. “My father knew how to spend money. My mother hated the way this yacht is decorated. All that marble, and the African woods, half a jungle was probably razed to the ground to provide them.”

  “How about you?”

  “I haven’t been onboard often. Only twice, before he sent me to the States.”

  “You can sell it if you want to. It belongs to you, doesn’t it?”

  “Not until my eighteenth birthday. If I live that long.” He said that without any emotion at all.

  Rosa leaned back and listened to the noises drifting down to them through the music from the sundeck. “That bunch up there don’t look like killers out to get you.”

  A shadow flitted over his face. “That’s the problem with killers. They never look like what they are.” Suddenly he was smiling again. “You’re not drinking that cocktail.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “I’ll get you something else.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m still working off the aftereffects of Fundling’s coffee.”

  He grinned. “He ought to have warned you about that.”

  “Never mind. Nice of him to think of getting some.”

  “He didn’t scare you, did he? I know what he can be like. Sometimes he says odd things.”

  She didn’t even flush when she said, “Not to me.”

  His eyes showed that he doubted that. “Did he tell you about himself?”

  Rosa shook her head. “He wasn’t particularly talkative.”

  “My mother saved his life.”

  “She did?” Rosa removed the little parasol from the maraschino cherry and chewed the sharp end of the cocktail stick.

  “Fundling wasn’t much more than a baby at the time; he could hardly walk. My father’s men rescued him from a fire in a hotel near Agrigento … of course they were the ones who’d started the fire in the first place.”

  “Of course.”

  “The hotelier hadn’t paid his debts. And maybe he told the wrong people who he’d borrowed money from. A lot of the hotel guests and staff died in the fire, and they rescued just that one little boy from the flames. The hotel burned to its foundations; there were no papers left, nothing to tell anyone whose child he was. All reduced to ashes.”

  “And no one made inquiries? No relations?”

  Alessandro shook his head. “No one. Looked like no one missed him.”

  She fished the cherry out of the glass with the cocktail stick, and after a good deal of hesitation put it in her mouth. Sticky and far too sweet. “Odd, don’t you think?”

  “Not really.”

  “How do you mean ?”

  “The whole thing happened at the time of the big family feuds, everyone against everyone else. Gunmen
shooting out of moving cars, whole clans butchered on the street in broad daylight. Children of enemy families were often kidnapped and held hostage to be used in blackmail demands.”

  She listened in silence as she removed bits of cherry from her teeth with the tip of her tongue.

  “Fundling was probably one of those hostages,” said Alessandro. “Maybe his kidnappers were just passing through and stopped off at the hotel for the night, but more likely the hotelier was in on the abduction himself. At the time my father assumed that the child’s family had been murdered, and the boy would have been the next victim. The arson attack on the hotel saved his life. The men brought him to us at the castle, and before anyone could decide otherwise my mother handed him over to the domestic staff. Between them they brought Fundling up. Later on he helped out in the garages. He can take an engine apart and put it back together again in no time at all; he’s pretty good with that kind of thing. For the last year he’s been taking messages, acting as a chauffeur, all that.”

  “And no one ever found out who his parents were?”

  Alessandro shook his head again.

  She put her full glass down on the deck beside her before she could give way to the temptation to sip it after all. Not here. Most certainly not with Tano Carnevare around.

  The thought of him brought her back to reality and the present. She instinctively glanced at the bar. And there he stood between the open sliding doors, a bright green drink in his hand, wearing bathing trunks and an unbuttoned shirt. Up on the sundeck a woman called his name, but he didn’t respond. He simply returned Rosa’s gaze in the same piercing way he had at the baron’s funeral.

  “What is it?” she asked sharply.

  Alessandro looked over her shoulder, frowned, said nothing but just stared darkly at Tano, his whole body tense—and bared his teeth.

  Rosa had caught it out of the corner of her eye, and next moment she thought she must have been mistaken. When she looked straight at Alessandro, his face was still angry, but his lips were firmly pressed together.

  Tano turned without a word and strolled back inside the Gaia. As he passed the billiard table, he slammed a ball across it. The billiard ball struck the cushion so hard that it jumped over the side, came down with a crash on the teak floorboards, and rolled away with a clatter.

  “What was that all about?” asked Rosa in a low voice.

  Alessandro didn’t reply.

  Isola Luna looked like a piece of moon landscape that had once dropped from the sky and, for some inexplicable reason, had been drifting around the Tyrrhenian Sea ever since. Gray volcanic rock, with flecks of brown and green macchia shrubs. But even the tough furze, oleander, and holm oak stopped trying to grow halfway up the mountain, as if all life there was doomed in advance to failure.

  The Gaia glided into a bay at the south of the island. The fine sand of the beach had presumably been shipped in. At least, from a distance Rosa hadn’t spotted such perfect, clean sand anywhere else on the coast of Isola Luna. As they headed ashore in two of the yacht’s motorboats, Rosa didn’t see a single plastic bottle or the slightest scrap of garbage floating in the water. Unusual for Sicily.

  She and Alessandro were sitting in the bow of the white boat, while Tano’s gang filled the other benches. Tano himself was steering the boat toward a narrow pier with the aid of the outboard motor. Rosa felt his eyes boring into her back. Why didn’t he stare at one of the three girls who had come aboard with him? One black-haired beauty with the measurements of a model seemed particularly interested in him, but he hardly seemed to notice her.

  The two other young men were much less vivacious than the girls with them. They were good-looking southern Italians, both wearing mirrored sunglasses. Rosa thought they were about as interesting as a couple of pretty soaps in the cosmetics department.

  Alessandro stretched out his hand to help her ashore. She accepted the offer not because she needed assistance, but just because she wanted to touch him. However, she took her fingers away from his the moment she was across the narrow channel of water. She had to be careful not to cross any other boundaries between them.

  “My family’s villa is a little way east of here, farther up the mountain.” Alessandro nodded vaguely up in the direction of the lava slope. “You can’t see it from here, but there’s a flight of steps in the rock.”

  “Does anyone live in the house?” asked Rosa.

  Before Alessandro could answer, Tano got in first. “No. A couple of our employees make sure it’s all right when they come to clean up the beach.”

  Alessandro bent down and picked up a handful of sand, letting it slowly trickle through his fingers. “My mother liked the house. She often came here.”

  The second motorboat came in. Four of the yacht’s crew unpacked all kinds of stuff, spread towels over beach chairs, set up a small music system, unloaded insulated crates of chilled drinks. The steward had come ashore as well and was checking up on the four-course meal the cook had been preparing when they were still on board. Until the full meal was ready to serve, they helped themselves to assorted snacks and antipasti.

  The crew went back to the yacht where it lay at anchor in the bay. Only the steward stayed ashore, taking the first orders for drinks. Two of the girls ran out into the surf in their tiny bikinis, while the third, Tano, and the others settled down on the beach chairs.

  Rosa was standing there, not sure what to do, when Alessandro took off his T-shirt, but kept his long pants on. He was suntanned like the others, and had a fit, athletic torso. He’d obviously played sports in boarding school. With a silent sigh she decided to copy him and took off her shirt, although she felt very skinny and pale in her black bikini top. She kept her jeans on. Compared with the other girls, her hips were too bony and her thighs too thin. When she’d arrived at the airport, she had wondered whether Zoe had an eating disorder, but now, next to those three Sicilian girls, she thought she must look anorexic herself.

  “Want to go into the water?” asked Alessandro.

  She shook her head, wondering what the hell she was doing here. Out of place was nowhere near strong enough to express the way she felt.

  “Let’s go for a walk, then,” he suggested. His smile was open, but she noticed that he was on edge. She thought of what he’d said before about killers, and looked at the others on their beach chairs. The girl was rubbing in sun cream, but the young men just lay there looking out at the sea. Maybe they were watching the other two girls swimming, but you couldn’t see their eyes behind the mirrored lenses.

  Tano looked up from the MP3 player that he had just connected to the music system and glanced at Alessandro. There was a cool, calculating note in his voice. “Your father wouldn’t have liked to have an Alcantara snooping around on the island.”

  Alessandro pretended to ignore Tano, but Rosa couldn’t help seeing his features harden.

  She gave Tano a challenging smile. “Nice to know there are things here that might interest my family.”

  “Let’s go.” Alessandro touched her fingers.

  “Not too far,” said Tano.

  Rosa took Alessandro’s hand. “Shall we see how far we can go?” And she assumed such a sugary smile that it even stopped the black-haired girl’s ostentatious application of suntan lotion for a moment.

  Hand in hand they walked away across the beach, taking no more notice of what was going on behind their backs. The music began, something fifties and jazzy, Rosa thought. Not her taste, and she was surprised that it was Tano’s.

  Alessandro led her up a narrow flight of steps between black lava rocks, then over a fissured embankment, and down to the sea again. From here neither the others nor the yacht could be seen. There was no sand, only rugged rocks where the breakers cast up foaming spray.

  “Weren’t you going to the villa?” she asked.

  “In a minute.” He was still holding her hand, and sounded thoughtful. “I want to show you something first.”

  Only a day ago she wouldn’t ha
ve trusted him an inch. And now here she was letting him take her around this godforsaken island on their own. But that was the point, she thought, I am letting him do it. Everything under control.

  They reached a smaller bay narrowing like a funnel toward the land. A grotto gaped open in the lava rock, black jaws sucking in the sea and spewing it out again. At the edge of the cavern, a few yards above the gurgling surf, there was a tiny plateau with a view of the swirling water below out to the open sea.

  Alessandro stopped as if something was holding him back. But Rosa kept climbing, and now she was the one offering her hand to him.

  “This was my mother’s favorite place,” he said as he climbed up to join her. “She often used to sit here painting.”

  “Was she good?”

  “I wish I had one-tenth of her talent.”

  “You paint, too?”

  “Sometimes.” He waved the subject aside as if he didn’t like to talk about it. “Only for myself.”

  She looked around her on the plateau, and saw steps cut in the rock and leading farther up the lava slope. Suddenly something occurred to her. “Gaia, the name of the yacht, was that—”

  “My mother’s name, yes. Gaia Carnevare.”

  She went right to the edge of the plateau and looked down at the current. Steep precipices exerted a kind of pull on her, and the feeling was even stronger here than usual. She thought she could understand why Gaia Carnevare had liked this place so much.

  She turned away from the roaring whirlpool and looked Alessandro firmly in the eyes.

  “Right,” she said. “Why are we really here?”

  He hesitated only a moment before answering. “To find out who killed my mother. And why my father let it happen.”

  GAIA’S SECRET

  THEY CLIMBED THE BLACK steps in the rock and worked their way up to the rugged volcanic cone of Isola Luna.

  The villa lay halfway up the mountain, and to Rosa’s surprise there was a broad courtyard in front of it, and a narrow road leading downhill.